Father Pitt

Tag: Houses

  • A Stroll on Parkway Drive in Mission Hills

    343 Parkway Drive

    As Father Pitt has remarked more than once, the variety and quality of designs in the Mount Lebanon plans like Mission Hills are constantly delightful. Here is a short stroll down Parkway Drive in Mission Hills.

    323 Parkway Drive
    Porch
    323
    315

    This one, unusually for the neighborhood, has had paste-on shutters applied to add sophistication to the home. Our friend Dr. Boli wrote an essay about those that generated some interesting responses from his correspondents.

    266

    Here is one that has real shutters, with hinges and everything.

    265
    335 Parkway Drive

    Old Pa Pitt is always pleased when an architect understands that a house is a three-dimensional object, not just a façade with a box behind it, and gives it rewardingly different appearances from different angles.

    335

    And, finally, here is a bit of good news for the neighborhood and the metropolis:

    250 Parkway Drive

    This new house is replacing a house that vanished a few years ago (for reasons unknown to Father Pitt, who does not always keep up with the news, and perhaps a neighbor can inform us). It has reached the stage where we can judge the design, and it is a good one. Individually it may never be Father Pitt’s favorite house, but as a citizen of the neighborhood it gets everything right. It is of similar height and size to its neighbors, and it honors the historic styles around it—look at those three-over-one Craftsman-style windows—while still being distinctly its own 21st-century self, just as all the other houses in Mission Hills are distinct and original. This is a demonstration of how new buildings can be added to historic neighborhoods.

    Cameras: Nikon COOLPIX P100; Sony Alpha 3000 with a 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 lens.

  • A Bit of Good News from Abdell Street, Manchester

    Row of houses on Abdell Street

    A year ago we published this picture of a row of houses in Manchester, with the second from the left under sentence of condemnation after a fire. At the time we were not sure whether it would be worth enough to restore. But it has been restored, and the whole row is looking neat and attractive again:

    Row of houses restored

    You would hardly know anything had happened except for a bit of soot on the bricks, which is hardly news in Pittsburgh, and the fact that the trim has been painted black.

    1012 Abdell Street

  • Second Empire Mansion in Allegheny West

    841 North Lincoln Avenue

    Built in about 1865, this grand house on North Lincoln Avenue is decorated in the highest Victorian manner, and the current owners have put much thought into the color scheme for painting the elaborate wood trim.

    Woodwork and lilacs
    Porch
    Porch woodwork
    Oriel

    Though it is hidden in the shadows between houses most of the day, this oriel is nevertheless festooned with decorative woodwork, including these ornate brackets:

    Bracket
    Lintel
    Dormer
    Dormering tower
    Second Empire mansion
    Front of the house in winter

  • House by Lamont Button in Mission Hills

    371 Parkway Drive

    Lamont Button was a very successful architect of houses for the well-off. Here is an example of his work in the tony automobile suburb of Mission Hills in Mount Lebanon. It’s in very good shape: some additions have been made, but they have been done in sympathy with the original design and would hardly be detected as additions if we did not have a photograph from when the house was new.

    371 Parkway Drive in 1928

    This picture comes from the August, 1928, issue of the Charette, the magazine of the Pittsburgh Architectural Club. This comparison shows us with what remarkably good taste the few alterations have been made.

    Front of the house
    In the snow
    Perspective view in the snow

  • A Stroll Down Beech Avenue in Allegheny West

    Porches along Beech Avenue

    Beech Avenue may be old Pa Pitt’s favorite residential street in the city. It is an eclectic mix of Victorian styles lined up on brick sidewalks, and something about it makes first-time visitors think, “I want to stay here forever.”

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  • A Few More Houses from St. Clair Terrace, Mount Lebanon

    53 Mount Lebanon Boulevard

    A few more houses from the St. Clair Terrace plan in Mount Lebanon. As always in these interwar Mount Lebanon neighborhoods, the variety and quality of the designs are both striking.

    1229 Washington Road
    1229
    42 St. Clair Drive

    This kind of house, with its front door in a cone-capped turret, is known to Pittsburghers as a “Normandy.”

    31 Mount Lebanon Boulevard
    27
    27
    1235 Washington Road
    1235
    25 Roycroft Avenue
    1241 Washington Road
    15 Mt. Lebanon Blvd

  • A Stony Row on Liverpool Street, Manchester

    Row at Liverpool and Fulton Streets
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

    This row of stone-fronted houses is a good example of late-Victorian eclecticism. The heavy rustic stone and elaborate foliage decorations say “Romanesque,” but the porch columns have “modern Ionic” capitals typical of the Renaissance. And it all works together just fine, though it might give an architectural pedant hives.

    Modern Ionic capital
    Nikon COOLPIX P100.
    Foliage

    The stonecarving was probably done by Achille Giammartini, who lived a few blocks away on Page Street.

    Achille Giammartini advertising his services

    Hiding in the shadows is a whimsical grotesque face that may remind us of somebody we know.

    Grotesque foliage face
    Row of stone houses
    Front door

    Note the old address, 185, carved in stone beside the door to what is now 1305 Liverpool Street. The addresses in Manchester changed at about the time Allegheny was taken into Pittsburgh.

    1301–1309 Liverpool Street, Manchester

  • The North Side of Rocklynn Place, Mount Lebanon

    37 Rocklynn Place
    Samsung Digimax V4.

    The southern side of Rocklynn Place (originally Rockwood Avenue) was part of the St. Clair Terrace plan. The northern side was sold off as individual lots a little bit later in the 1920s, and some splendid houses went up, some of which we see here. The pictures were taken with two different cameras, one of which was set to monochrome just because it makes one think of the picture differently to know that color will not be a factor.

    37 Rocklynn Place
    Kodak EasyShare Z1285.
    27 Rocklynn Place
    25 Rocklynn Place
    33 Rocklynn Place
    33 Rocklynn Place
    45 Rocklynn Place
    49 Rocklynn Place

  • Like New on Hoodridge Drive, Mount Lebanon

    201 Hoodridge Drive

    Seven rooms and two baths: this house (obviously photographed a few weeks ago) is at the more modest end of Hoodridge Drive, but it is in good taste and almost completely unaltered since it was built in 1935. We know that because, when it was “just completed,” it was pictured in a Press real-estate feature. Although the microfilm reproduction is very poor, we can still see enough to tell that nothing material has changed.

  • Birthplace of Gertrude Stein, Allegheny West

    Gertrude Stein birthplace

    “Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania,” says Alice in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. “As I am an ardent californian and as she spent her youth there I have often begged her to be born in California but she has always remained firmly born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. She left it when she was six months old and has never seen it again and now it no longer exists being all of it Pittsburgh. She used however to delight in being born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania when during the war, in connection with war work, we used to have papers made out and they always immediately wanted to know one’s birth-place. She used to say if she had been really born in California as I wanted her to have been she would never have had the pleasure of seeing the various french officials try to write, Allegheny, Pennsylvania.”